


just because you're breathing

by cocaine_tongues



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post Reichenbach, careless drug use, obligatory post-reichenbach snivelling, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-19
Updated: 2012-04-19
Packaged: 2017-11-03 22:47:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/386838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cocaine_tongues/pseuds/cocaine_tongues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for this prompt on sherlockbbc.livejournal.com: <i>"Sherlock and John's reunion after Reichenbach is unexpected by both of them. Sherlock, for whatever reason, is in and out of London between tracking down Moriarty's web. Sherlock, on his downtime, with no cases and no John, is bored. Bored enough to start using again. When he ODs, he happens to be taken to wherever John is working now. The last person John expected to see being brought in is Sherlock, given that he's supposed to be dead and all. Cue John saving his life followed by angst.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	just because you're breathing

The flame flickers briefly and bites into the tobacco, and for a moment John’s incessant self-deprecating inner monologue ( _well done John well fucking done since when can you afford this I mean look at yourself you sad wanker you can hardly afford rent_ ) is eaten away by the bitter smoke he draws into his lungs.

For quite some time now, the sticker considerately placed on the packet by the government to inform teenagers that SMOKING KILLS has had a promising gleam to it.

*

Mary pretends she doesn’t mind.

But he does see her brow furrow with disapproval at him sneaking out in the evening or angling his tired frame over the bathroom window-ledge. Mary, his saviour.

She loves him talking about Sherlock, because he’s almost a different man when he does. He spins the well-loved yarns that glitter with blood and bullets and streetlights; he grows, illuminates the room with the brilliance of that thrill of a man who is no longer a man but a semi-god, living in the cosy shrine of John Watson’s heart.

She smiles and nods and listens. She’s no detective, but reads him like a book nonetheless.

*

Sometimes he can’t sleep all night, so he listens to the rain.

He’d tell his therapist about it, but he’d sacked her.

Say what you wanted to say. John turns over each word, phrase, sentence; each one perfectly formed and polished like pebbles, smooth from being thrown against each other by raging water. He won’t say any of them, obviously, because although he knows them off by heart – an unceasing litany his mind recites to him at night, going over them the way your fingers work over rosary beads – he can’t make sense of them. He knows just how juvenile this sounds, but saying anything would be like spilling out his insides onto the floor. He knows these off by heart, too, the length of _intestinum tenue_ , the weight of _vesica biliaris_ , the shape of _cor hominis_ – but he doesn’t know what they _mean_.

He certainly doesn’t want them handed back to him, tied with a neat bow of “grief-induced sexual identity crisis” or something equally awful. He can’t read the notes now, anyway; she holds her notebook perpendicular to her knees.

So he just sits there, wrapped in the cocoon of his defiant silence, chewing at the inside of his mouth. He wonders idly whether she’s somehow pleased about what had happened; there’s only so many hours he can fill talking about having had a front-row seat to senseless slaughter and an alcoholic father.

“Look, John, I know this is hard for you…” _Excellent deduction_ , he thinks, _perhaps you can take over his job_.

Helen’s voice is invariably what she perhaps hopes is comforting and professional. His is a study in trained calm. They could be actors reading from a script. “…but you can’t carry on with your life if you live on a delusion. I know you were close friends…”

“Delusion?”

“Coming to terms with the fact that our loved ones aren’t who we thought they were isn’t pleasant, John, but it’s crucial.”

He bites at the inside of his cheek for a bit more; then stands up so violently she recoils in her chair slightly, instinctively, like she thinks he’s going to hit her. _As if_ , he thinks sourly. (Offended? Disappointed.)

“John,” she starts.

“I don’t think you understand, Helen, which is a bit shit since that’s what I pay you for.” He throws on his jacket and grips his cane so tightly pain flares up his arm. _Don’t let your voice shake don’t let your voice shake don’t let it shake goddamnit._ “That time wi–” _God_.

Pause, swallow. Rinse and repeat. “That’s all I have left. ”

Exhale. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing you anymore.”

Almost a military nod as he turns around and limps to the door dignifiedly, but she twitches again when a photo frame bursts into splinters on the floor following his exit.

*

There was a time he couldn’t read. The letters and words were stacked in a way he no longer understood; he would start reading a sentence, trying to hold all the words in his mind the way you hold water in your mouth but by the time he came to its end he had forgotten the beginning and had to start again, and before he noticed fifteen minutes had gone by and he was still reading the same fucking sentence.

He got his shit together, though, and he reads often now, almost as much as he did when he was younger.

He likes Vonnegut a lot.

_“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.  
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes’.” _

*

John quite likes working in ER. What seems like centuries ago, the monotony of being a GP served as a welcome balance to waking up in the middle of the night to chase murderers or finding body parts in the fridge; after Sh– the incident, though, he couldn’t stand it. All day he would attend to exotic, in the patients’ opinion, rashes or wipe little kids’ noses with professional warmth and all the while he had a desperate craving to rip out his own veins at the tediousness of it.

Something in him yearned for tragedy. And if he couldn’t find it at crime scenes, he’d find it somewhere else.

_(You’re not haunted by the war, Dr Watson, you miss it.)_

“I don’t know,” he tells her.

“After you spend a day with people with half a face or their guts hanging out or a limb in a plastic bag,” John says, “you feel better about yourself just because you’re breathing.”

Mary’s smile falters a little when she hears that.

*

He’s on his second Styrofoam cup of hospital coffee and first sewn-back finger of the night when a man is wheeled in; tangle of dark hair cutting across an ashen forehead, streaked with blood, and Scott is firing off _Overdose, probably cocaine, cardiac arrest, unconscious, defibrillators._

John rushes towards them, the first pang of adrenaline like a hit already coursing through his own veins.

“How long?” he breathes, looks down

and as he does so, Scott’s answer ( _Don’t know how long he’s been out, woman found him on street maybe ten minutes ago_ ) curiously floats above his head.

Time pauses, and the room has suddenly gone very quiet.

The shouts and cries of pain come from a distance, now, and John can only hear the uneven pulse roaring in his ears as if his heart was trying to make up for the inaction of the one being shocked in front of him and

“ _Again._ Watson, _I need that diazep_!” Scott’s voice is coming from above the water that seems to cover his head, distorted; he breaks through the surface – meets her intense gaze for a split second – then grabs at the man’s hand and yanks it upwards to examine it under ER’s purgatorial light.

The room is reeling, dancing, and he rubs (somewhere, his brain is impressed at the lucidity of the action) at a pearly patch of skin at the base of the man’s thumb.

“Watson, what the–“

“Excuse me,” he says, turns around and knocks over a wheeled tray. Various implements scatter on the floor. He numbly steps over them.

He doesn’t know how a plastic basin with shards of bloodied glass ends up in his hands, but it’s just perfect.

He leans against a wall, out of the nurses’ way, and is violently sick.

*

The ward is dark, filled with a delicate web of human sighs and mechanic beeps. He listens to them for a moment before he goes in. Sherlock’s by the window and it’s already a success; John was expecting to find the bed to be empty or taken by somebody else and really, he didn’t want to go through the trouble of finding another therapist or throwing himself in front of a bus.

_He wipes his mouth and pushes the basin into the hands of one of the nurses and runs back; the man’s heart is beating, now, but his pale limbs are flailing aimlessly so John grabs the syringe of diazepam out of somebody’s hand – he doesn’t care whose – and drives the needle into a vein; there are nurses with icepacks and Scott’s shouting she needs propofol, and the man is still convulsing, so he prepares another dose of diazep and counts under his breath, then_

John sits down by the bed. He remembers how every time he took a shortcut through an alleyway at night and heard footsteps behind him, his heart would start beating not with fear but idiotic hope – and then a passerby would walk past and humiliation would grip at his chest, pathetic pathetic pathetic. That glimmer, then a crushing feeling in his stomach every time he saw a swirl of dark tweed in a crowd, and, well.

He didn’t go to Sherlock’s funeral, but had buried him countless times.

And now he lies there; the omniscient brilliance of stars he so readily dismissed trapped behind his eyelids, face the colour of the hospital walls and John wants to cry but doesn’t. Instead he takes the palm with the pearly burn mark and thinks of that afternoon when Sherlock got some hexamine fuel tablets and set the table on fire, burning his hand.

John traces his fingers over it, as if looking for confirmation of what seems to be quickly diminishing sanity, then turns over the plaster-white fingers between his own.

“You’re not dying on me a second time, you wanker.”

*

Sherlock doesn’t wake up the next day.

Or the next.

Or the next.

They have no idea who he is, beneath the riot of unwashed curls and homeless stubble; there was nothing in his pockets apart from about 20 quid in change. They wait.

John doesn’t sleep, and he can’t remember eating anything. He tells Mary a colleague is ill and he needs to take on some extra hours, just for a week or so.

His brain is only now catching up with the situation at hand. A thought which had sprung up in his brain as he emptied the contents of his stomach into a plastic basin now resurfaces, like a bloated body floats to the surface of water. Namely: Sherlock Holmes, his flatmate and best friend, has faked his own death and _never bothered to tell him_ during the following three years.

_A life without the idiot doctor had turned out pretty well, then_ , and Mary stands in the doorway, frightened and distressed at John with his face in his hands and pieces of what used to be a mug scattered over the floor.

*

John sneaks into the ward at break, after he finishes his shifts. Each time he rests his forehead on Sherlock’s shoulder, he can’t help but notice he smells less and less like Sherlock, and more and more like the hospital.

*

One day, John walks into the ward and Sherlock’s bed jeers at him with a mess of tangled bedclothes.

Well, fuck.

He turns around and sees a nurse in the doorway. “Where’s –”

“We don’t know”, she half-wails pleadingly, and John’s stomach does a somersault. “I was just doing me rounds, and I find this – I’ve notified the ward head, of course –”

John tries to pull his thoughts together - an exercise in futility, since there aren’t any. There’s a ringing in his ears. He stumbles towards a toilet, shell-shocked ( _Sherlocked, good one, John_ ), his hands tugging at a tap and maybe if he can get this _bloody tap_ to work things will make some sense; he pulls so hard he hurts his fingers, but finally it gives way and he wets his face with the cold water and slowly exhales.

Sadly, though, any calming effect it might’ve had is overruled rather violently by the fact that when he raises his head, there’s a face looming in a mirror from one of the stalls.

He lets out a scream, which bounces from white tiled walls until it’s muffled by a hand of much the same colour; then is dragged into a cubicle, where he slips out of Sherlock’s frantic grasp onto a closed toilet lid. There’s a moment of decidedly awkward silence as John sits, unashamedly shaking with hands over his face, trying to blink himself awake.

“John?” Sherlock offers at last, uncertainly, along with what he hopes to be a reassuring hand on John’s shoulder.

“ _Don’t touch me,_ ” he half-whispers, half-growls, and Sherlock shrinks away immediately like a mimosa.

Eventually, he looks up through his fingers. Sherlock shifts uneasily before murmuring, “If you think it was only difficult for you, John, you underes–”

_Difficult. That_ does it. The next thing John knows is that he’s holding him against a cubicle wall, fingers tearing at the material on his chest, their faces inches apart, and “Oh, it was _difficult_ for you, was it? Maybe you even _missed_ me? Is that what you were going to say?” There may or may not be water on his cheeks that has nothing to do with what came out of the broken tap, and he’s beyond caring. “You stupid bastard, why would you – _how_ – I’ve waited _three_ fucking years, you dick! Do you even have any idea how I’ve – the past three days – three years without a word and you turn up here out of your head on coke, I thought-”

He pauses to draw a breath; there are footsteps outside, rapidly approaching. They freeze.

They listen to a nurse, apparently oblivious to the fact there’s a patient missing, whistle _Sweet Home Alabama_ while he empties his bladder. John reflects on what they must look like – pressed against each other in a tiny stall, Sherlock’s breathing (not quite so boring, now) tickling his damp features – and almost finds it funny.

The nurse leaves without washing his hands.

John resignedly slumps back onto the closed toilet lid and contemplates the blur that is a graffiti some med student left on the door. A jagged sigh escapes him. He refuses to look at Sherlock. “Right. You have 30 seconds to explain what the _hell_ is going on, after that I’m handing you over to the police.”

The consulting detective-cum-fugitive patient tries to fold his body inside the tiny cubicle to level with John’s face, quite a feat, considering the space at hand; he finally settles for a sort of painful half-crouch, takes John’s wrists and starts explaining in an urgent, low voice.

“Moriarty knew just where to aim, John, and he aimed at you. If I hadn’t jumped off that roof, you’d be dead; burn the heart out of me, indeed.” John blinks, and Sherlock swallows quickly. “At any rate, he didn’t stop being the most dangerous man in London after he pulled that trigger. If there’s anything at all like life after death, it’s the way his can make his web dance to his tune, even now. I couldn’t – I wouldn’t put you in that danger again.”

John starts to open his mouth, and then closes it. _If I hadn’t jumped off that roof, you’d be dead_. He tries to rearrange the words, think of another meaning for them, but each time his brain arrives at the same conclusion. _Sherlock jumped off a roof for him. For John._

He licks his lips. “How did you…” Gestures vaguely.

“Molly. I’ll explain later,” Sherlock dismisses impatiently when John opens his mouth again. “Look, John, however lowly you think of my awareness of such things, I know I can’t just miraculously reappear in your life after three years and expect things from you –”

“Well, yes, no shit, Sherlock. I’m engaged now.”

Even now, Sherlock scoffs at the possibility of somebody revealing something to him, rather than the other way round. “I _know_ that – do you really think I wouldn’t look out for you? Mary Morstan, primary school teacher, divorcée, drives a Toyota Prius.” He stops, trying to stifle a sigh with frowning. “She seems… pleasant.”

They look at each other, perfectly aware the silence is speaking volumes more than they could.

“Jesus, I wouldn’t have tried to find you if you told me not to. A text, _anything_ –“

“We both know you’d cut off Mycroft’s supply of confectionery in cold blood until he betrayed my whereabouts.”

Corners of their mouths quirk up at that. Sitting in a cramped little stall stinking of disinfectant is just fine, John realises, because it just now hits him that Sherlock is just an arm’s length away, blinking and breathing and his acute Roentgen-ray gaze is momentarily clouded with something dangerously close to affection. It’s like some sort of a once-in-a-century astronomical event right in front of him, though John has yet to see a total eclipse or a transition that would do similar things to his stomach.

He can feel his blood thrum against Sherlock’s fingers around his wrist, and suddenly his chest is tight with those words he’d scripted, crawling up his throat. _Say what you wanted to say._

Instead, he wets his lips and settles for, “What now?”

“The hospital and police will want to know who I am, obviously; highly inconvenient, given the circumstances. I’ll need your coat, John, and a plastic hair net.” Sherlock straightens up and holds out a hand expectantly.

John frowns – “What? Why?” – and realizes. “No. _No._

“You’re not going off anywhere.”

“What?”

John shakes his head in disbelief. He’d almost forgotten he used to live with an exceptionally tall nine-year-old.

“Sherlock, you’ve OD’d, your heart stopped beating, you’ve been unconscious for three bloody days. You are not leaving this hospital until _I_ decide you can.”

“I’ve done this before, completely fine. No aftereffects.” Sherlock shrugs, like he could shake off any health implication with a dismissive twitch.

“You’ve –” Hardly surprising, considering; Mycroft had told him to inspect any syringes Sherlock used for ‘experiments’ very closely. “Is that supposed to _convince_ me?”

“They’ve already notified the police, I have maybe just over eight minutes. No, John, _listen_ to me; if they find out I’m alive, the better part of these three years is going to go down the drain. I need to leave, and I need to do it right now.”

“ _Sherlock_ –”

John bites his lip in frustration, at the man in front of him, at the situation, at the fact he already knows he’s lost – he can feel that pale fire licking at Sherlock’s insides, that restless drive behind impatient eyes, and nothing he can say will do a goddamn thing. It’s happening too fast. Back from the dead ( _for him_ ) and already he’s leaving again, and John had loved that constant cheeky game of tag with death, that smirk as they flitted right on the edge and never looked down, but only because he could always follow.

He stands up and presses Sherlock’s feathery frame against him with a force proportional to the one tightening around his throat.

“Did I ever tell you you’re completely, utterly bonkers?” he whispers into his collarbone.

“I like to think of it as a part of my personal charm.”

John wonders whether it’s how Sherlock fails so spectacularly at masking the faltering of his voice, or maybe the fact that they’re not looking at each other, that makes a strangled “Please don’t leave me” escape his own throat. He doesn’t expect a reply, and he doesn’t get one. They step apart, an unwritten agreement not to cross glances firmly in place. He takes off his white coat and watches Holmes slip into it. Sherlock didn’t wear labcoats; he saw such petty trivialities as beneath him.

This one brings out the sallow hue of his skin.

“Will I…hear from you?” _Well done, John, this moment wasn’t Mills-and-Boon enough._

“I can’t promise anything, John.” Sherlock slides open the lock and lingers there, biting his lip, the unfamiliar hesitation in his eyes almost satisfying, in a way. “But you have my word that I’ll be back. Oh, and quit smoking, I need my blogger in top form when I am.” He forces a smile and gestures with his hand before letting it drop back to his side; then, with an expression not unlike the one that preceded his swan-dive from Bart’s, he leans forward and kisses John very gently on the cheek.

John is just sufficiently rooted to the floor by surprise to not stumble back when Sherlock’s lips make contact with his skin. They’re so gentle he’s not even sure he felt them; his hand runs up to his cheek, as if to check whether they left any physical confirmation – and before he can open his mouth and pour out a thousand useless words, Sherlock’s left. John doesn’t know how long he stands there, trying to remember how to breathe.

When the fire alarm begins to wail, he slides slowly down the wall and turns his face upwards, greedily drinking every ear-splitting vibration assuring him he’s not asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfiction, for this fandom or otherwise, which I feel I have to say in defense of my writing skills? A thousand thanks to keladry_lupin @ livejournal for cleaning it up a bit C:


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